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I flirt with her at first, telling her I can see why he would want to stay home when he’s got her; she is peroxided and greasy, with the flat, stunted features of generations of malnutrition, and privately I am thinking that if I were her boyfriend I would be relieved to trade her even for a hairy cellmate named Razor.
What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this – two things: I crave truth. And I lie.
Germaine (Jamie) Elinor Rowan, Adam Robert Ryan and Peter Joseph Savage,
I recently found a diary entry from college in which I described my classmates as ‘a herd of mouth-breathing culchie fucktards who wade around in a miasma of cliché so thick you can practically smell the bacon and cabbage and cow shite and altar candles’. Even assuming I was having a bad day, I think this shows a certain lack of respect for cultural differences.
people don’t know who to worry about, the little girl with the gun or the big guy apparently without, and the distraction of deciding keeps them off balance.
He was one of those people whom your mind instantly starts turning into a cartoon: scribbled wings and beak and ta-da, Professor Yaffle.
We think about mortality so little, these days, except to flail hysterically at it with trendy forms of exercise and high-fibre cereals and nicotine patches.
Remember, pilgrim, as you pass by, As you are now so once was I; As I am now so will you be . . . Now death is uncool, old-fashioned. To my mind the defining characteristic of our era is spin, everything tailored to vanishing point by market research, brands and bands manufactured to precise specifications; we are so used to things transmuting into whatever we would like them to be that it comes as a profound outrage to encounter death, stubbornly unspinnable, only and immutably itself.
‘Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,’ he told me reproachfully.
Maybe she, like me, would have loved the tiny details and the inconveniences even more dearly than the wonders, because they are the things that prove you belong.
I am not good at noticing when I’m happy, except in retrospect. My gift, or fatal flaw, is for nostalgia. I have sometimes been accused of demanding perfection, of rejecting heart’s desires as soon as I get close enough that the mysterious impressionistic gloss disperses into plain solid dots, but the truth is less simplistic than that. I know very well that perfection is made up of frayed, off-struck mundanities. I suppose you could say my real weakness is a kind of longsightedness: usually it is only at a distance, and much too late, that I can see the pattern.
I still find all the basic premises of the place offensive.
Corruption is taken for granted, even grudgingly admired: the guerrilla cunning of the colonised is still ingrained into us, and tax evasion and shady deals are seen as forms of the same spirit of rebellion that hid horses and seed potatoes from the British.
His morgue assistants all hate him for this, which doesn’t bother him because he mostly hates them too.
Cooper prides himself on instant, unpredictable dislikes; as far as we’ve been able to figure out so far, he dislikes blonde women, short men, anyone with more than two earrings and people who say ‘you know’ too much, as well as various random people who don’t fit into any of these categories.
I wasn’t sure how to answer that, given that as far as I was concerned he and his buddies did in fact look exactly like the fucking Time Team.
Even the youngest was one of those deeply unnerving toddlers who look like bonsai adults; it had a prim, pudgy face with a beaky nose, and it stared at me from Vera’s lap, its lips pursing, and then retracted its chin disapprovingly into the folds of its neck.
it felt awkward and temporary, like hurriedly assembled refugee accommodation, not like a home.
This hits close for me. It’s how I’ve felt since moving to Birmingham.
Don’t let me deceive you: the evenings may have been roast chestnuts around a cosy turf fire, but the days were a grim, tense, frustrating slog.
She was like a reprieve; like Eurydice, gifted back to Orpheus from the darkness for a brief miraculous moment.
The girls I dream of are the gentle ones, wistful by high windows or singing sweet old songs at a piano, long hair drifting, tender as apple blossom. But a girl who goes into battle beside you and keeps your back is a different thing, a thing to make you shiver.
From that day on, any nagging little half-remembered thing shimmers with a bright aura of hypnotic, terrifying potential: this could be trivia, or it could be The Big One that blows your life and your mind wide open.
And then, too, I had learned early to assume something dark and lethal hidden at the heart of anything I loved. When I couldn’t find it, I responded, bewildered and wary, in the only way I knew how: by planting it there myself.
Human beings, as I know better than most, can get used to anything. Over time, even the unthinkable gradually wears a little niche for itself in your mind and becomes just something that happened.
‘Jesus, Maddox,’ O’Kelly said, annoyed. ‘Less of the Hollywood. She didn’t eat the sister.’
